skin. I am saved from living in ignorance and dying in darkness
only by the sensitiveness of my skin. Some men learn through borrowed
experience. Shut them up in a glass tower, with an unobstructed view
of the world, and they will go through every adventure of life by
proxy, and be able to furnish you with a complete philosophy of life;
and you may safely bring up your children by it. But I am not of that
godlike organization. I am a thinking animal. Things are as important
to me as ideas. I imbibe wisdom through every pore of my body. There
are times, indeed, when the doctor in his study is less intelligible
to me than a cricket far off in the field. The earth was my mother,
the earth is my teacher. I am a dutiful pupil: I listen ever with my
ear close to her lips. It seems to me I do not know a single thing
that I did not learn, more or less directly, through the corporal
senses. As long as I have my body, I need not despair of salvation.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] A piece of parchment inscribed with a passage of Scripture, rolled
in a case and tacked to the doorpost. The pious touch or kiss this
when leaving or entering a house.

CHAPTER VII

THE BOUNDARIES STRETCH

The long chapter of troubles which led to my father's emigration to
America began with his own illness. The doctors sent him to Courland
to consult expensive specialists, who prescribed tedious courses of
treatment. He was far from cured when my mother also fell ill, and my
father had to return to Polotzk to look after the business.

Trouble begets trouble. After my mother took to her bed everything
continued to go wrong. The business gradually declined, as too much
money was withdrawn to pay the doctors' and apothecaries' bills; and
my father, himself in poor health, and worried about my mother, was
not successful in coping with the growing difficulties. At home, the
servants were dismissed, for the sake of economy, and all the
housework and the nursing fell on my grandmother and my sister.
Fetchke, as a result, was overworked, and fell ill of a fever. The
baby, suffering from unavoidable neglect, developed the fractious
temper of semi-illness. And by way of a climax, the old cow took it
into her head to kick my grandmother, who was laid up for a week with
a bruised leg.

Neighbors and cousins pulled us through till grandma got up, and after
her, Fetchke. But my mother remained on her bed. Weeks, months, a year
she lay there, and half of another